Check out Magical Millie’s Courageous Journey

By Marcus Harrison Green

At Hinton, we strive to elevate the stories of the historically underinvited, whether or not those stories carry our imprint. At a time when narratives about Native communities too often dwell on loss and struggle, a new project from the Seattle Indian Health Board insists on something else: joy, imagination, and resilience. Magical Millie’s Courageous Journey, a coloring book authored by Abigail Echohawk and youth intern G’Centae Rodriguez, with illustrations by Megan McDermott, is more than just a creative project. It’s a love letter to Native kids who deserve to see themselves celebrated on the page, and in their own communities.

“I never thought I was gonna write a book,” G’Centae said. “I just had the opportunity, so I took it.” That sense of chance, of stepping into authorship because the community made space for it, is one of the book’s beating hearts. This is not merely a book about vaccines. It’s a case study in what happens when young people are invited to shape how knowledge gets transmitted, and when adults are willing to listen to them.

Echohawk, a national leader in public health and decolonizing data, knows how sterile health messaging can be. She also knows it doesn’t work. “In our clinics, staff told me the kids were bored with the coloring sheets we gave them. They said, ‘We just need coloring sheets for Native kids, and we can’t really find any.’ That’s when I knew we needed to do this. Our kids deserve to see themselves on the page.” The line lands like a rebuke to decades of generic, copy-paste medical pamphlets in waiting rooms, where Native children are invited to imagine themselves only as abstractions.

The decision to give Millie her horn, her humor, and her Indigeneity is an act of cultural repair. Representation, in this sense, isn’t ornamental—it’s connective. “To have a book like this that not only centers cultural values of what it means to be part of a community,” Echohawk explained, “it recognizes that Native people are engaged in and participate in science. This book, in a sense, is an act of resistance against policy and practice that is harming and could kill Native people.”

The act of resistance, crucially, is fun. At the April launch, G’Centae recalled the electric moment of signing copies for children who lined up like it was the world’s best meet-and-greet. “Just watching their face light up as I gave it to them—that was warming. It was nice. I didn’t think it was gonna be like this.” Echohawk added, with comic timing, “The kids were acting like he was Michael Jordan.” The spectacle matters: if joy can be radical, then joy in a unicorn-shaped coloring book is practically revolutionary.

What makes Magical Millie more than a novelty is its process. “It gave us a project to spend a lot of time together, talking about what it means to be part of a community and the cultural values embedded in that,” Echohawk said. But she is careful not to frame herself as the sole authority. “I learned from him too—he made the language sound like a kid would talk, not like a scientist. That was critical.”

And for G’Centae, the most critical moment was revision. “It was challenging, but good challenging. I’d think, ‘I can’t say that, I should say something else.’ It made me think. And it made the book better.” Editing here becomes not just a craft exercise but a metaphor for how communities refine themselves, through dialogue, reworking, repetition, and mutual recognition.

We are, let’s not forget, living in a moment when books by BIPOC authors are disappearing from shelves, and when vaccines—once treated as banal miracles—are treated instead as political litmus tests. “We’re tired of people only talking about how we die,” Echohawk said. “We should talk about how we thrive.” That’s as much a call to arms as it is a philosophy of publishing.

And thrive they did. At the launch, dozens of Native kids ran through the Seattle Indian Health Board clinic, faces sticky with cotton candy, brandishing their copies of Magical Millie. They weren’t just holding books—they were holding mirrors.

“When you accomplish something big, you deserve a big celebration,” Echohawk said. “And our BIPOC kids don’t get that often enough. They deserve it.” The sentence is both obvious and rare, a reminder of how easy it is for the world to deny children of color the ordinary ecstasy of seeing themselves reflected back.

What Magical Millie’s Courageous Journey accomplishes, then, is not only medical education but cultural imagination. It insists that Native children deserve to be addressed not as afterthoughts in a waiting room, but as protagonists in their own stories.

And when you look at it that way, Millie isn’t just a unicorn. She’s an invitation, to laugh, to learn, and to belong.